Does the Maven Assembly Plugin (maven-assembly-plugin) support the EAR format?

Question

Does the maven-assembly-plugin support EAR as a valid format? The documentation seems to indicate you can configure it any way you want:

• zip
• tar.gz
• tar.bz2
• jar
• dir
• war and any other format that the ArchiveManager has been configured for

http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-assembly-plugin/

Answer 1

Yes, it does. Just specify in your assembly descriptor:

<formats>
  <format>ear</format>
</formats>

Answer 2

It can but you should use the maven-ear-plugin instead, cause it know better about ejbs etc. of which maven-assembly-plugin doesn't know anything about.